


Free Coffee and a Forty Minute Presentation on Loam

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Coffee, Gen, Genderqueer Character, Overhead Projector Sheets, Vampires, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24546580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Two characters in search of a coven... Three characters in search of an afternoon... Four characters in search of a refill
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Free Coffee and a Forty Minute Presentation on Loam

The notice said:

**_Ankh-Morpork Witch Coven Seeking Third Member_ **

****

**_All Genders, Species and States of Vitality Welcome_ **

****

**_Meeting 3:30 PM Thursday. The Palace, Servant’s Entrance. Free Coffee and a Forty Minute Presentation About Loam_ **

****

”Are you sure about that?” Mrs. Palm asked.

“Which part?” asked the Lord of the City.

“All of it.”

“Yes.

“Then why did you ask which part?”

“Why did you ask me if I was sure?”

“Glad we’re on the same page,” Mrs. Palm said, handing the sheet of paper over to printers.

They received two written responses. One was a “Don’t be ridiculous” from Eskarina Smith and the other was a “Not interested, thank you” from Susan Sto Helit. There were a lot of powerful women in Ankh-Morpork belonging to the generation or two younger than Rosemary and Havelock, but they had for the most part found their own way.

“Perhaps there’s some young men interested in magic?” Vetinari suggested hopefully. He’d been brought up as a witch since his aunt Roberta and her friends in Genua hadn’t known any other way to raise a child who wasn’t interested in being a prince, a woodcutter or a merchant in need of a lesson, and who had alarming quickly come to the conclusion that most heroes ought to be the ones in the oven when the birds came for the gingerbread house. 

“They’re all at the university programming that thinking engine.” It wasn’t that she disliked Ponder Stibbons and his students. It was just that they lived in the kind of mad feverish wizardry that had mostly died out after Ridcully became Archchancellor. They didn’t understand that the point of magic was to not use magic.

The person who showed up on Thursday was neither a young woman nor a young man. 

There was a knock on the door of the entrance to the kitchen on the ground floor of the palace. 

“You have to ask me in.” 

There was a brief pause which was followed by Mrs. Palm peering around the door to catch sight of a black ribbon and Lord Vetinari saying in the tone of voice he used when people were too nervous to knock on the door of the Oblong Office, “Come.”

The vampire pushed the door all the way open and stepped over the threshold.

The vampire had short dark hair and was wearing the kind of soft cotton shirt that had been popular when Buddy Celyn had been touring. Over the ribbed collar was draped a necklace of coffee beans. The shirt had the words “I’m not a boy or a girl I’m dead” on it.

“That’s missing a comma,” Vetinari said automatically.

“You’re- you’re the Patrician. What are you doing faffing about in the kitchen with a pile of herbs and a silly hat?” It wasn’t that silly of a hat really. It was stiff felt and looked vaguely Quirmian.

“I’m afraid I’ve been promoted. Shifted onto the map. I’m one of the ten most powerful witch-identifying magic users in the Plains and Ramtops,” the Patrician said primly.

“You identify witches? Isn’t that a bit—“

“I identify _as_ a witch. I have no business telling other people what they are.”

“One of the ten most powerful? Really? There are quite a lot of witches in these parts.”

“They don’t seem very interested in organized events,” Mrs. Palm said, with some disappointment.

“I’ve known witches. Witches changed my life.” Maladicte lowered their voice “I was Weatherwaxed.”

Vetinari covered his mouth with his hand. “I may have Havelocked a few people. Vampires don’t seem to realize that a door, once opened, can be entered in either direction.”

“My name’s Maladicte. That’s with an ‘e’ on the end. Or you can call me Gerald.”

“With an ‘e’ on the end?” Mrs. Palm asked.

“No,” Mal said, more coldly than they had intended to.

“This is Mrs. Rosemary Palm, the head of the Guild of—“

“Seamstresses, I know.”

“The Lancre coven recognizes me as a witch,” Mrs. Palm said.

“We stan the Lancre coven,” Maladicte said quietly.

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean, don’t we? That’s why we’re here isn’t it?”

Lord Vetinari looked around for Drumknott, remembered that he had said he was busy and didn’t completely trust witchcraft, coughed and said “I believe the word ‘stan’ is a function shifted verb with a meaning similar to fanatic or groupie.”

“Or you know, I’m very interested in loam.”

“Really?” Mrs. Palm said, amazed.

“No. I’m here for the coffee and my girlfriend is expecting me at half four.”

“Youngest witch boils the water,” said Vetinari, who put more store by the rules printed inside the cardboard boxes of board games than anything as debatable as sexual experience or parenthood. 

“I was born in 1943.”

“Touché,” this meant Mal was seven years older than the Patrician and it was his job to press the buttons on Leonard of Quirm’s terrifying coffee machine.

While the machine was making noises that seemed far too loud to be good for the machinery, Vetinari lounged against the counter. Maladicte looked vaguely annoyed by this because it wouldn’t be cool for them to lounge against the architecture if someone else was doing it. 

“You’re the one Commander Vimes rescued with an airdrop of Klatchian coffee, aren’t you? Don’t be embarrassed,” Mrs. Palm counseled, “Vimes has had to be rescued at least as many times as he’s rescued people.”

“Vetinari’s Terrier up a tree, eh?”

“No,” the Patrician said thoughtfully, “he had to get out of that one himself.”

The coffee machine made a noise like a bell being struck and Mrs. Palm dispensed it into little cups—she was also a few years younger than Maladicte. 

It was very frothy and smelled amazing.

Maladicte picked one of them up and sipped from it. It was nearly half crema and extremely bitter. “Oh, that’s fantastic.”

“Rosemary thinks it shouldn’t be so foamy.”

Maladicte shrugged. “I mean, I’m not picky.”

They looked at Lord Vetinari. Here was a man that had played both sides of a war. He could have done something else. There were other things Ankh-Morpork could have offered. A fighting chance is really just a chance to fight.

“Are you a student of human nature, your Lor— I mean... Sorry, how do you want to be called in this context?”

“Havelock will do, Much Honoured Fenris Maladicte Lucien-Marie Gabriel Elegia Star Valerian Solus Desdemon Lycidas Threnody Sable Inveigle Alexi Mesmereld Nikola Belarius Fatidic Sterling Argent Kieran Ephemerality Xavier Sektober Morgan Arcite Tulane Casimir Claret Chant Gerald of...” the Patrician glanced at a bit of writing on his hand, “Klotz.”

“Well done. I know Twurp’s is... out of date. Someone must have got a copy of my signature.”

“It’s kind of funny,” Mrs. Palm said. “They say middle names were invented to prevent people doing magic on you and vampires go around asking for extra long receipts.”

“Well let’s get upstairs to use the light-to-make-pictures-bigger-and-appear-on-a-wall machine.”

“A Leonard da Quirm? Is the coffee machine also a da Quirm?” Maladicte asked, eyes shining.

“I’ll just shout at him to shut off the traps in the corridor.”

“He lives here? He built traps?” Maladicte was practically floating off the ground with delight.

“A vampire after my own heart.”

“Just your coffee, Havelock, I assure you.” 

“Technically I built the traps, he just keeps updating them.”

“He thinks like you, that Mister Vimes. Looking after people while on the outside it looks like you’re on the opposite side. He said that you see the value in things because you think about the future.”

“We learned from the best.”

“Meaning each other?”

“You asked if I was a student of human nature? I consider myself a student of the world.”

They continued into the depths of the palace, winding through stone staircases. 

They went through some kind of secret passageway in a wall.

“Now I’m probably going to make a spectacle of myself—“ Vetinari said before beginning what looked like a very complicated four dimensional game of hopscotch. 

When he reached the door at the end of corridor he knocked and shouted “Leonard! We have visitors!”

There was some kind of huge clanking noise and the sound of scraping gears.

“I think that’s the all clear. Although, Maladicte, maybe you should go first just to be safe.”

“We do experience pain, you know.”

“Oh, Leonard’s corridor traps are quite humane. I have it on good authority that no one that they’ve killed has suffered.”

Mrs. Palm gave him a strange look.

“Look, I spend a lot of time with rats and we’ve got an Igor in the basement.”

Maladicte shrugged. “Good enough for me.” They walked down the hallway. Nothing happened.

Rosemary Palm followed them cautiously. She’d never been in this part of the palace before. She hadn’t realized Vetinari spent a couple of minutes nearly every day dancing some kind of two-step with Death. But she wasn’t surprised. After all, sometimes Lord Downey ate some of his own mint humbugs. 

The door opened onto a light and airy workshop, which for once was not full of machines collapsing under their own ingenuity.

Leonard was setting up something on a cart that involved a lamp and a lot of glass and sheets of thin clear material with writing on them. 

The machine projected a drawing of a triangle with the corners labeled sand, clay and silt onto the wall of the room.

“Oh that’s quite clever,” Mrs. Palm said, “we should get one of these for committee meetings.”

“You’re Leonard of Quirm,” Maladicte said, mouth hanging slightly open. If they weren’t broadcasting in half a dozen other ways that they were a vampire, the fangs would have given the game away. “Could I get an autograph?”

Leonard, at random, picked up a drawing of an armored vehicle, the sight of which made the vampire’s naturally lukewarm blood run cold. He scribbled a signature over the top of the drawing and handed it to them. 

“I’ll never let it fall into another’s hands,” Maladicte said solemnly. 

“You’ve seen something like that before,” Mrs. Palm observed.

The vampire nodded.

“Can anyone tell me why there is no history of tying people to rocks to be fed to large flying things in this city?” said Vetinari in a tone of voice that ought to have made the Duchess of Sto Helit sue for copyright.

“Because hydraulic cement was invented twenty-two centuries ago?” Mal said, worrying the edge of the sketch in their hand between finger and thumb.

“We haven’t got any glacial erratics,” Leonard said matter-of-factly.

“Well, you say that, but...” Rosemary said, looking from Leonard to Vetinari and trying not to laugh. 

“Very risible,” the Patrician said glacially. “Yes. We don’t have the right kind of rocks. The city’s on loam.”

“Loam is a composite soil,” Mrs. Palm said. “It depends on its component parts. The different kinds of particles compensate for the drawbacks of each type of soil. Sand doesn’t retain enough water. Clay doesn’t get enough drainage. Silt doesn’t let enough air in. But in loam these thing balance out. Air and water can come and go. It holds moisture and nutrients, it’s got enough structure. It makes good bricks. Loam is good for growing and building. Walls made from loam keep heat in and can stand indefinitely, but you need knowledge and work and time to make it work. Measure a dozen times. Build once. And then build again once the mud has grown over the walls. They’re still down there, walls built from earth hundreds of year ago. Reclaimed by the same earth.

A witch grown on loam recognizes that she can’t work alone. She knows that knowing what she knows doesn’t make her better than anyone else. She knows how to listen. She tests her own weaknesses even if that means setting someone else against herself. A witch grown on loam is at home on shifting soil. She expects change. She creates it or embraces it or changes its course.”

Mal looked at Lord Vetinari to see if all this pronoun-ing was bothering him at all. If it was, he hid it as well as a vampire. Because Mal _was_ a vampire, they asked “Do you ever feel like you’re the wrong gender to be a witch?”

“Wizards are academics. Sourcerers inherit power. Warlocks get their power from somewhere else. Mages create their own spells. Witches belong to their community. Sono uno stregone.”

Maladicte looked down at the drawing of an armored vehicle on a rotating track. The image still filled them with a sense of foreboding.

“That doesn’t answer your question... Yes,” Vetinari continued “In this place and time I feel like an outsider.” There were three hundred witches between the Ankh and the mountains and he was the only one he knew to be a man. You do tend to notice that sort of thing even if you spent half an hour arguing with a Gooseberry imp that the word sistren has been around just as long as brethren and if you draw a red underline under it one more time I’m giving the Commander of the Watch an early birthday present and he won’t let you call him “Now Don’t Let Me Ah Vimes.”*

Maladicte nibbled on their necklace. “It’s kind of ridiculous, because he’s, you know... a bit obtuse about this kind of thing... but the last time I spoke to Commander Vimes I mentioned that I didn’t want to be called a lady and he just kind of looked at me and said ‘you can always choose and you don’t have to choose and I understand that it’s not a choice,’ which ought to have been awkward and uncomfortable but—“

“But it wasn’t. Yes. I’m glad he’s stopped being _stupid_ about vampires.” Vetinari pronounced the word ‘stupid’ with the same venom that Polly did.

“Glup,” Mal said. “Rekao bih nepromišljen.”

“Yes, well that would be because you think rather a lot.”

“We’ve got thirty-five more slides,” Mrs. Palm said, looking at the stack of clear sheets next to the projecting machine. “When did you say your young lady was expecting you?”

“If you’ve got more coffee I can run downstairs and get someone to send a clacks,” said Mal, as though the actual running was the part contingent on the coffee.

*Look, technomancy is hard, okay. Even if you make a concerted attempt at reading the manual.


End file.
